Ilana Jacobs

I hold a joint appointment at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and Harvard University. I study ciliates found in anoxic and micro-oxic environments. Many eukaryotes in these conditions are known to be anaerobic respirators; Their Mitochondria have evolved to produce energy through pyruvate oxidation and substrate level phosphorylation (Rotterová et al., 2020), and produce hydrogen efficiently using [Fe-Fe]-hydrogenase via bacterial endosymbionts. We describe this type of Mitochondria as the Mitochondrial Related Organelle (MRO). In Dr. Colleen Cavanaugh’s lab, I am developing CRISPR/Cas9- based genome editing protocol for an anaerobic ciliate, Heterometopus palaeformis strain RAJCA, to better understand the functions of the MRO as well as identifying genes involved in the metabolic interdependency between the ciliate host and their endosymbionts. I am running transfection experiments and genotyping the transformed cells through DNA and RNA analysis (PCR, RT-PCR, transcriptome data preparation and analysis). This project is sponsored by Dr. Virginia Edgcomb and Dr. Fatma Gomaa at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.